


Stone One

by Ancasta, Callisto



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Hugging, Hurt!Sam, Hurt/Comfort, Self-Harm, season 7
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-11
Updated: 2012-02-11
Packaged: 2017-10-30 23:04:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/337168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ancasta/pseuds/Ancasta, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Callisto/pseuds/Callisto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“Dean? What’re—”</i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>“Shut up. Just shut up and stay where I put you for one goddamn minute.” Dean gets a hand around the back of Sam’s neck and presses him close. His heart is hammering, Sam seems to be struggling, and he feels too hot and weird to be wrestling with his blood-smeared brother in a motel bathroom. He should have finished this back in that damn warehouse, not let Bobby’s phone call stop him from grabbing hold of his fool brother and explaining stone one a little better.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stone One

_Dean: “You got away. We got you out, Sammy. Believe in that. Believe _me_ , okay? You gotta believe me. You’ve got to make it stone number one and build on it.”  
\--7.02 Hello, Cruel World--_

 

Dean is sitting on the bed and looking down at his feet. He’ll untie his mud encrusted laces any moment now. He will. Right this second, though, he’s going to lie back on the cheap chenille bedspread and pretend it doesn’t smell like cheese. It’s Sam’s bed anyway, so who cares what his jacket is covered in?

Dean closes his eyes, and waits for the sound of the shower starting up. Truth be told, as filthy and gross as he is, he wouldn’t mind a bit of Sam-free shuteye right now. There are times the Impala doesn’t feel big enough for the two of them these days, especially not since Lucifer began coming along for the ride. A little alone time is just what the doctor ordered. As far as Dean is concerned, Sam can empty the entire fucking water tank if he wants. Except...

Dean opens his eyes and blinks at the water stained ceiling.

...Sam won’t, of course. Dean sighs, levers himself to a sitting position and winces at all the caked-on graveyard dirt crumbling off his clothes. He shrugs his jacket all the way off and tosses it into a corner. Hunting zombies in a rainstorm. God, what a life.

Normally, there’s nothing Dean likes better than a good, old-fashioned chase through a cemetery. But what with Sam twitchy, sleepless, and poking at his palm every second of the day for the last week or so, Dean just wanted poor dead Travis McKee back in his grave and Sam out for the count as fast as possible.

Only... 

“Sam?” Shit. There are no shower sounds coming from the bathroom. Dean listens hard as his heart picks up, though he tries to play it cool. “Get a move on, princess. You’re not the only one covered in gunk.”

Something that might be a moan reaches him.

Dean pushes to his feet—swaying just a bit, because fuck he’s tired—and crosses to the bathroom door. It’s locked, so he knocks on it.

“Dude, open up.” He waits, palm flat on the door. 

Sam doesn’t answer and the door doesn’t open. Dean wants to curl his fingers into a fist and do some pounding on the wood. Instead, he rests his forehead there for a second – he has the mother of all headaches starting. He knows, _knows_ , Sam is doing his best to get through each day, his Lucifer blinders firmly in place. It’s just that sometimes Sam’s best gives Dean a migraine.

Dean hears something and lifts his head. It sounds a lot like mumbling.

“Who’re you talking to in there, Sam?” Talk to _me_ , Dean thinks, not that make-believe devil riding your ass. “Sam?”

The sharp, pure sound of glass shattering answers him, and the option to simply wait things out vanishes.

“Goddamn it!” Dean backs up a couple of steps, just far enough to lift his leg and kick right above where the bolt is nestled in the frame. The lock holds, so he does it again. 

The wood splinters and the door bangs open. Sam is there, right in front of him, shoulders heaving and blood fucking _everywhere_. For one awful moment, Dean’s legs buckle and his vision dances. But after a deep, slow breath, the world makes sense again—as much as it ever does—so he puts one foot in front of the other and enters the room. 

Sam is sitting on the floor, blood running down his right arm in skinny crooked rivers and Dean’s heart lurches. _Fuck no, not this, not this, not this_...but the wound is not to Sam’s wrist. It’s higher up on Sam’s arm, just below the bend.

“What the hell, Sammy,” Dean says, shaky as he kneels beside him. “How’d you drop a glass and have a piece cut you there?”

Sam doesn’t answer. He’s biting his lip and using his bangs not to look at Dean, so Dean simply tugs on Sam’s arm to see the injury better. Sam is right to be embarrassed for pulling this kind of shit and scaring the—

Sam is clutching a wicked looking shard of glass in his other hand.

Dean’s mouth is suddenly dry.

“Sam...”

Sam tries to pull his hand away. As if he’s _pissed_. As if Dean has no right to be there.

And that? That is the last fucking straw.

Dean grabs Sam’s wrist, not really caring if the way Sam groans means he’s using too much pressure. “What is this, huh? What the fuck is this?” He’s dipping his head as he pulls, trying to get Sam to look at him. Sam swears and finally unfurls his fingers. Once he does, Dean gets rid of the glass, throwing it in the trash so hard the bin rattles.

“It’s nothing,” Sam says, jerking his hand out of Dean’s grasp. The minute Dean lets go, Sam wraps his arms around himself. The blood from his arm is smeared across the front of his shirt in a half dozen different directions, reminding Dean of some nightmare piece of modern art. “You weren’t supposed to see,” Sam finally says, swallowing hard.

“See what?” Dean says, his eyebrows lifting. “You carving yourself open? Well, I’ve got a newsflash for you—all this red kind of gave it away.”

“It’s not that bad,” Sam says, his hair still in his eyes. Not once since Dean came in the bathroom has Sam looked at him.

“Compared to what?” Dean takes hold of Sam’s arm again and this time Sam lets him. Dean stares at the wicked looking slice and wonders how to handle this latest development in the fucked up-psyche of his brother. He wants to just get on with it; bandage the wound, clean up the mess and put Sam to bed, like he did when they were kids. Only this isn’t a scraped knee, and feeding Sam rocky road is not going to make it all better. Not anymore.

Dean takes a moment to stand and run some water through a facecloth. He crouches back down and keeps his voice low. “You gotta help me here. I’m... I’m fucking lost with you and this shit. I know I come off as pissed at you sometimes, and I know that’s why you’re putting your game face on and telling me ‘fine’ every chance you get.” He wraps the cool wet cloth around the cut. Sam flinches but stays where he is, staring at what Dean is doing as he wipes up the blood staining Sam’s arm. Thankfully, the flow from the wound itself seems to be slowing.

“It’s like my hand was, Dean,” Sam says, at long last lifting his head. His eyes are clearer than Dean expected, his skin flushed, his jaw stubbornly set. Dean supposes he should be relieved his brother isn’t a sobbing, frantic mess. But the idea that Sam calmly locked himself in a room to slice himself open isn’t exactly reassuring.

“Yeah?” Dean moves the cloth down Sam’s arm to his hand, giving them both something to focus on. Thankfully, the cut is relatively shallow and it’s bled worse than it actually is. A minute or two more and they should be golden. For now.

Sam takes a moment, seems to collect himself as they wait. “I see you looking at me. I know you know what I’ve been doing since the warehouse. Whenever Lucifer started talking to me, making me question, I’d press on my hand where it was cut. But it’s been healed now for weeks.”

“That is because I am an awesome stitcher, my friend.”

Sam startles, almost seems to smile before his head goes back down. Dean presses the cloth back around the cut, eases off when no new blood flows out. He senses a home stretch coming up.

Sure enough...

“When I touch it now, I don’t feel...anything. I need something else.”

“Something else for what?” Dean leans in. Maybe if he gets close enough this will all become clear. 

Sam frowns and his lips press flat. His eyes flicker away, then back to Dean before he speaks. “I have to feel it hurt. You said it before, in the warehouse, pain here feels different than it did in the cage. That’s the key. If I hurt, really hurt, then I know I’m alive. That this is real, not something Lucifer has made for me.”

Dean has no choice but to let go of Sam’s arm at that point and get to his feet. He needs to goddamn _breathe_ for a second. He paces a step or two, scrubs a hand over his face, and turns back to look at his brother. Still with dried blood all over him, still with his eyes alternating between Dean and somewhere off to the right. _Jesus Christ_. “Sam, you gotta stop. I never meant for you to start slicing yourself. Do you have any idea how fucking dangerous this is?”

“Stop?” Sam makes this weird manic half-snort, half-laugh sound. “Yeah, okay. Whatever you say, Dean. I’ll stop. I’ll let Lucifer in full-time, shall I? He says hello, by the way.” 

Dean resists the urge to check behind him.

“Dean, don’t you get it? No more bleeding, no more pain, and Lucifer is right back with me. You really want him out there with us on every hunt we do? Because I sure as hell don’t. Not when I’m the only thing standing between you and Dick Roman.” Sam throws the bloodied cloth across the room. He jabs a finger up at Dean, eyes blazing, his face suddenly high with color. “You did this, Dean! You taught me how to make him go away, and it is the only thing that works.” Sam looks away, throat working. “So you do not get to take this away from me. Not when it keeps me sane and at your side, man.” Sam wipes his stained hands on his jeans. “You just don’t,” he says, quietly but firmly. “So maybe you should—"

“Get up.”

Sam blinks, but Dean just doesn’t have the words right now. He extends his hand down. “Stand up, Sam. Right now.” 

It’s the big-brother-don’t-fucking-mess-with-me voice Dean hot-wired into Sam the first time John left him in charge of an overly curious toddler. It has always worked, and now is no different – even if Sam does sway alarmingly once he’s upright.

But this next part? Dean takes a deep breath...

...and hauls Sam in, as hard and fast as he can. 

“Dean? What’re—”

“Shut up. Just shut up and stay where I put you for one goddamn minute.” Dean gets a hand around the back of Sam’s neck and presses him close. His heart is hammering, Sam seems to be struggling, and he feels too hot and weird to be wrestling with his blood-smeared brother in a motel bathroom. He should have finished this back in that damn warehouse, not let Bobby’s phone call stop him from grabbing hold of his fool brother and explaining stone one a little better.

Because a blood-stained bandage is one thing – and Dean will own up to that gladly, since at the time it stopped Sam drilling Dean full of holes. But now he’s got Sam shutting himself away and slicing himself in secret, so he really has no choice but to try and fix this.

“Listen to me, Sammy. Listen!”

Miracle of miracles, Sam stills.

“We’re not doing this like this, you hear me? Stone fucking one is _me_ , you dumbass. Believing in me. So yeah, I showed you how to use your damn hand to keep him away. You believed me then, and you’re going to believe me now when I tell you to stop.” Sam fists handfuls of Dean’s shirt, pulling it tight across Dean’s chest from the back. Dean swallows, turns his face into all that hair. “Sammy, please. We will figure something else out, okay?”

No answer, just another squeeze of his shirt so he shakes Sam a little. “Okay?”

Sam makes a noise into Dean’s neck and nods. “Well, okay then.” Dean waits a moment for his heart to slow – and for Sam to stop squeezing quite so hard. Then he draws back until Sam is at arm’s length. “Lucifer still here?”

Sam sniffs, wipes his sleeve across his face and looks uncertain and hopeful and about twelve years old. His eyes dart over Dean’s shoulder and he clears his throat. “Uh, no. I think we grossed him out.”

It’s like a light bulb goes off.

“Well, then,” says Dean, “that’s what we do.”

Sam stares at him, eyes still shining. His eyebrows dance into his hairline. “What, _hug_ each other?”

Yeah. Dean really hasn’t thought this through, but screw it. He juts out his chin. “Why the hell not?”

Sam opens and closes his mouth a couple of times before any words make it out. “Because it’s fucking impractical for one!”

“Oh, and excusing yourself to hack into a body part isn’t?

And like that they’re both glaring and staring, toe to toe as the years fall away in the face of something so achingly familiar.

Sam cracks first, shaking his head as a half-smile curves his mouth. “Man, our lives are weird.”

Dean breathes out. “Dude, you said it.” 

Another moment to regroup and Dean eyes his brother, wonders what he’s thinking. “We cool?”

Sam shrugs, so Sam-like Dean might hug him again. “If you don’t mind me grabbing you in public, then I guess we’re cool.”

“God.” Dean scrubs a hand down his face, the magnitude of what he’s signed up for starting to dawn.

“Hey, you do know I see him most when we eat, right? Like, in diners?”

“Shut up.”

“And libraries. I see him a lot in libraries. Oh, and bars. Usually when you’re hitting on—

“Yeah, yeah, I get it.” Dean cuffs him across the head, just because. Sam ducks his head and snorts, and Dean can’t believe how happy that makes him. “Go get clean. You are not coming anywhere near me ever until you get rid of all that graveyard gunk.”

“Dude, most of it’s yours.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what you get when you hug me. Man the fuck up.”

Sam stands there a moment, eyes all over Dean like Dean has shit on his chin or something. “You know, this is not going to work,” he says softly. 

Dean straightens his shoulders. “Then we’ll find something else. Sam, you are not cutting yourself. End of discussion. Now get in the goddamn shower.”

Dean adds a stern finger pointing at the shower curtain. Which Sam ignores _in favor of kissing Dean on the fucking cheek first_.

“Thank you,” Sam says simply, the dimples out for the first time in way too long. 

“You’re welcome,” mumbles Dean, heading for the door. Then he collects himself. “And don’t do that again!” 

Sam’s grin is truly an evil, wonderful thing.

*****


End file.
